Canonical has revealed some statistics pertaining to its relatively new snap packages. The firm stated that there are now more than 4,100 snaps available, several of which we’ve reported on, they include the Opera web browser, PowerShell Core, Slack, the Kotlin programming language, Plex, Firefox Quantum, Microsoft"s VoIP client - Skype, the popular music streaming service - Spotify, and Visual Studio Code.
Impressively, snaps are seeing 100,000 installs every day on cloud, server, container, desktop and on IoT devices, which works out to around three million installs each month. Of course, these statistics don’t only take into account snap installs on Ubuntu, but other distributions too. Canonical said that snaps are supported on 41 Linux distributions including Ubuntu, Debian, Linux Mint, Arch Linux, Fedora, and many more.
While our previous snap coverage mainly focused on apps that are popular on the desktop, Canonical points out that it has snaps for programs that primarily run on cloud, server, and IoT devices including Kubernetes, AWS, Microsoft Azure, Heroku, Google Cloud, Kura, OpenHAB, and more.
Snap packages first launched alongside Ubuntu 16.04 which was released in 2016. They have several benefits over typical Linux packages, for example, their dependencies are bundled into the package making them easy to install, they get automatic updates and can be rolled back by the maintainer if issues arise, and they’re sandboxed, giving the user more security.